Delighted conservationists said that they had found conclusive proof of the existence of a rare giraffe-like creature in Congo's Virunga National Park that has defied the odds of survival in a region battered by savage conflict.
First discover

If you hang out in front of the student center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus during the next few days, you might see a towering, green structure swishing to-and-fro like a giant stalk of grass in the wind.
Don't worr

As our yogurt culture evolves, so do the bacteria involved in making it, ridding themselves of extra genes and in the meantime giving scientists a glimpse of the evolutionary process.
Scientists have sequenced the genome of Lactobacillus Bulgaricu

Sitting stone still under a skull cap fitted with a couple dozen electrodes, Austrian scientist Peter Brunner stares at a laptop computer. Without so much as moving a nostril hair, he suddenly begins to compose a message -- letter by letter -- on a g

Somewhere on Earth, close to 4 billion years ago, a set of molecular reactions flipped a switch and became life. Scientists try to imagine this animating event by simplifying the processes that characterize living things.

Scientists are working on a tactile sensor that could one day lend a human touch to robotic hands. The new sensor responds to pressure and texture with a sensitivity and spatial resolution comparable to human fingers. Film made of stacked layers of s

Seaweed, crustacean shells, and a patient's own cells may allow doctors to improve bone grafts. To fill gaps in a bone—which can result from accidents or surgery, especially when some kinds of tumors are cut away— surgeons will often craft a scaf

A massive crater in Antarctica may have been caused by a meteor that wiped out more than 90% of the species on Earth 250 million years ago. The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath a sheet of ice and was discovered by scientists

Although the glass most people are familiar with is quite clear, physicists' understanding of glassy materials, which exist as a state of matter between solid and liquid, isn't quite so. Physical Review Letters suggests the shift is continuou

The best evidence yet for the oldest life on Earth is found in odd-shaped, rock-like mounds in Australia that are actually fossils created by microbes 3.4 billion years ago. Known as stromatolites. They're produced layer by layer when dirt sedime

Fossils from northern Germany have revealed a dinosaur that evolved into a dwarf, ending up only about one-third the size of its closest known relatives. The 4-legged plant-eater was no lap dog: It measured about 20 feet from its snout to the tip of

At $4,000 a head, the allergy-free felines don't come cheap. But the biotechnology firm behind the project believes sensitive owners will happily fork out extra for the chance to have a cat that doesn't leave them wheezing and sneezing.
In

After years of searching, scientists have rediscovered Illacme plenipes, a millipede that is the world's leggiest creature, in a tiny patch of San Benito County, California [Photo | Video]
This type of millipede was first discovered in

Origen has been working on new ways to produce human antibodies and proteins in eggs, milk and farm crops. Allow scientists to alter the chicken genome in ways that could allow them to produce drugs in very large quantities and develop new therapies.

Ancient relatives of today's plants and animals may have survived Earth's oldest, longest winter, when the planet was covered in a deep sheet of ice. The planet was encased in a shell of ice at least a half-mile thick more than 2 billion yea

Researchers at Harvard University said on Tuesday they had started efforts to clone human embryos as a source of valued stem cells, using all private money to bypass federal restrictions on such work. (The joys of the marketplace at work)

Dust clouds blowing across the Atlantic Ocean carry hidden pathogens that might reach the United States.
While the dust itself can cause respiratory stress, scientists have now confirmed that clouds originating in Africa carry microbial life that

"We're seeing the atmosphere as we've never seen it before," said a CloudSat investigator. "We're no longer looking at clouds like images on a flat piece of paper, but instead we're peering into the clouds and seeing t

Using strong magnets and a pigment developed by ancient Chinese warriors, scientists turned a three-dimensional system into one with just two dimensions.
The transformation's discovery was accidental, but it provides physical evidence for seve

An apparent crater as big as Ohio has been found in Antarctica. Scientists think it was carved by a space rock that caused the greatest mass extinction on Earth, 250 million years ago.
The crater, buried beneath a half-mile of ice and discovered b

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

The cave's ecosystem probably dates back around 5 million years when the Mediterranean Sea covered parts of Israel. The cave was completely sealed off from the world, including from water and nutrients seeping through rock crevices above. Scienti

Reports of a mysterious medical condition are cropping up across the country but doctors are divided on whether it is a real disease or all in their patients' heads. Called Morgellons Disease, patients who report having it describe sensations of

Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one Harry Potter inherited from his father. Researchers in England and the US think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic mater

It sounds nuts, but a scientist says his team has made light go backward. Previous work has slowed light to a crawl. Now a pulse of light is given a negative speed and—as if just to make your head spin—the researcher says the experiment made light ap

A huge slab of folded Earth that scientists think used to be part of the ocean floor has been detected near the planet's core.
The discovery supports the theory that Earth's crust is constantly recycled deep into the planet as molten mater

Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome. Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight

A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineer

The scientists stuck tiny radio transmitters to the wings of 14 green darner dragonflies and followed the radio signals in an airplane and with handheld devices on the ground.
"They migrate exactly like birds—or birds actually migrate like in